Monday, February 15, 2010

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended software delivers all the features in Photoshop CS4 and more. New features make it easier than ever to apply the unrivaled editing power of Photoshop to 3D models and motion graphics. Improved image analysis capabilities satisfy technical needs, while a newly refined interface speeds up your workflow.

Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended feature a newly refined, tab-based interface in a single, integrated window, with self-adjusting panels arranged in docked groups. Automatically keeping tools well organized and away from your work area means you get greater efficiency, less clutter, and better results, faster than before. Click to enlarge.

Discover new dimensions in digital imaging

Revolutionary 3D painting and compositing Paint directly on 3D models, wrap 2D images around 3D shapes, convert gradient maps to 3D objects, add depth to layers and text, and get print-quality output with the new ray-tracing rendering engine, and enjoy exporting to supported common 3D formats.

Adjustments panel Simplify image adjustment by easily accessing every tool you need to nondestructively adjust and enhance the color and tone of your images; on-image controls and a wide variety of presets are also included in the new live and dynamic Adjustments panel.

Masks panel Quickly create and edit masks from the new Masks panel. This panel offers all the tools you need to create editable pixel- and vector-based masks, adjust mask density and feathering, easily select noncontiguous objects, and more.

Motion graphics editing Paint, add text, and clone over multiple frames of an imported video sequence. Sync painting and other effects to your soundtrack with new audio controls. And work faster using single-key shortcuts.

The new Adjustments panel helps eliminate almost 90% of the mouse movements required to make nondestructive image adjustments. Click to enlarge.

Spot color and exposure adjustments are more natural with the improved Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools.

A range of shots, each with different exposure, color, and focal points (left) automatically becomes a single, color-corrected, expanded depth-of-field image with Auto-Blend Layers. Click to enlarge.

Richer painting and drawing toolset Create or modify images with a wide assortment of professional, fully customizable drawing tools, paint settings, and artistic brushes. Simply drag to resize brushes and adjust for hardness as you paint and preview brush strokes.

Enhanced auto-alignment of layers Create accurate composites with the enhanced Auto-Align Layers command. Move, rotate, or warp layers to align them more accurately than ever before. Or use spherical alignment to create breathtaking panoramas.

Enhanced auto-blending of images Easily create a single image from a series of shots that have different focal points with the enhanced Auto-Blend Layers command, which smoothly blends color and shading and now extends your depth of field, automatically correcting vignettes and lens distortion.

Extended depth of field Combine a range of images, each with a different exposure, color, and focal point--with options to preserve tones and colors--into a single color-corrected image.

Image analysis Extract quantitative information from images with powerful tools that calculate distance, perimeter, area, and other measurements. Record and export data for further quantitative analysis. Even set measurements to the scale in DICOM file headers.

Efficient file management with Adobe Bridge CS4 Get instant access to Adobe Bridge CS4 with faster start-up, use new workspaces to jump to the right display for every task, easily create web galleries and PDF contact sheets, and more.

Industry-leading color correction Enjoy dramatically enhanced control with reengineered Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools that now intelligently preserve color and tone details. Make precise adjustments with Brightness/Contrast and Curves controls, the histogram, channel lines, and a clipping preview.

Multi-Touch support on Mac laptops Pinch, swipe, rotate, zoom, and scroll with just the touch of your fingers by taking full advantage of the Multi-Touch trackpad on newer MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops (requires Mac OS X v10.5).

Profiles to support the color-blind Design with sensitivity for color-blind individuals by creating soft proofs of your images using built-in Color Universal Design Organization profiles. Extensibility--Get and share Adobe Flash technology-based panels that developers create to accomplish customized tasks. Plus, get tips and tricks from the thriving worldwide community of Photoshop users through the new Adobe Community Help online service.

Top new features in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended

The new versions of Photoshop are about much more than just adding new features. They're about providing you with best practices in the tasks you do daily--about making your work in Photoshop not just faster and easier, but more intelligent, and more natively nondestructive. Here are the top new features and enhancements in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended.

Live, nondestructive corrections with the Adjustments panel Photoshop CS4 speeds workflow performance with the Adjustments panel, cutting the time it takes to make nondestructive adjustments like Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation, and much more. There's no dialog box maze to navigate--just go straight to the task at hand. The Adjustments panel brings the right tool for the right job to your fingertips, dynamically, saving precious time. The panel features the new Vibrance adjustment, giving you greater control over color saturation while preserving delicate tones, such as skin colors. On-image adjustments are now available for Hue/Saturation and Curves. Plus, for even greater convenience and time savings, the panel features a wide variety of modifiable presets for each type of change, including more than 20 new preconfigured, customizable starting points. Photoshop CS4 speeds you through countless tasks with the Adjustments panel.

Re-editable, feathered, density-controlled masks The new Masks panel smooths and speeds the creation and adjustment of pixel and vector masks, making it easier than ever to apply effects to precisely defined areas of an image. Now, with simple sliders, you can adjust the density and feathering of a mask, to control both the sharpness of the mask edge and how much of the adjustment effect you'd like to reveal. The Refine Mask feature allows simple yet fine-grained control over the mask size and edges. And Color Range has been upgraded for better accuracy and power. It's a fast way to automatically create powerful and detailed masks based on single or multiple colors, with simple controls for the spatial tolerance and "fuzziness" of the color sampling.

Simply drag the new Rotate View tool outside the image area to spin your canvas to the orientation that works best for you. Click to enlarge.

The new Pixel Grid appears at magnifications of 600% or higher, facilitating the finest detail editing. Click to enlarge.

Bridge CS4 makes it easier to work with all of your image assets, with intuitive, easily discoverable controls for camera import, viewing and sorting, contact-sheet and web-gallery creation. You'll also find more versatile throughput to Photoshop CS4, including opening multiple files as a single, multi-layered image, and much more. Click to enlarge.

Enhancements to 3D support in Photoshop CS4 Extended include the ability to merge 2D layers onto 3D layers--effectively turning a 2D image into part of the 3D object. Click to enlarge.

Preview and export audio tracks and frame comments from the Animation panel in Photoshop CS4 Extended. Click to enlarge.

More refined, natural results with Dodge, Burn, and Sponge In the days of film, paper, safelights, and chemicals, photographers dodged and burned their prints during exposure, to darken and brighten areas of an image as they created it. It was an art that required steady hands and practice to master. The newly refined Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools in Photoshop CS4 take the pain and practice out of preserving tonal quality while you spot-correct exposure and color saturation. Simply paint the area you want to adjust and get advanced results in a fraction of the time.

Enhanced Auto-Align, Auto-Blend, and new 360-degree panoramas The automatic alignment and blending technology in Photoshop CS4 enhances a wide variety of features, but nowhere are the improvements more obvious than in Photomerge. Now, when you stitch a sequence of images into a panorama, enhanced blending combines with new vignetting and geometric distortion corrections to bring you even better results--a panorama with more natural colors blended from one end of the scene to the other. Additional improvements include the ability to create 360-degree panoramas, automatic detection of fish eye lenses to compensate for their inherent distortion, and the new Collage option which rotates and scales individual images as they are combined using Auto-Align and Photomerge.

Extended depth of field Whether it's the extreme close-up, the microbial world, or simply low-light conditions, there are times when the depth of field you can capture with your camera is extremely shallow. Now, you can shoot the scene with a series of focal points, and use the enhanced Auto-Blend Layers feature to automatically create a new, single image with a depth of field encompassing the entire series. You can even color-correct the images at the same time, automatically. This feature provides breathtaking enhancement of any scene where lighting and depth of field are in short supply.

Fluid canvas rotation Photoshop CS4 introduces a revolutionary new feature that lets you paint and draw as easily and naturally as sitting down at an easel. With the new Rotate View tool, you can nondestructively spin your canvas to any orientation you desire--a boon to every illustrator, whether you paint by mouse or tablet. No pixel distortion, no craning your head to get the perspective you want, and no matter how you spin your canvas, Photoshop CS4 adjusts your selections, grids, rulers, and other tools and features to match your chosen orientation.

Ultra-smooth, extra-precise pan, zoom, preview, and painting tools Most modern computers contain a powerful graphics processor (GPU) that is almost like having a second computer inside the box. Photoshop CS4 leverages the power of your GPU with OpenGL technology to blast past the image-viewing restrictions of yesterday. Zoom all the way down to the level of individual pixels, with perfect clarity even at the oddest magnification percentages. Smoothly navigate around the largest images with no stutter or preview lag. Use the new Pixel Grid to easily edit images at the highest magnification. And revel in a faster, easier painting workflow, with brushes you can resize by dragging your mouse; new brush cursors that more clearly preview brush strokes before you make them; and improved, higher precision tablet tracking. Navigating very large images is easier than ever--instantly zoom high overhead to move to a new area of the image, and just as instantly zoom back in to the highest magnification. You can also ÒtossÓ the image across the screen with the Hand tool--the physics engine in Photoshop CS4 will give you a natural pan in any direction.

Next generation Adobe Bridge CS4 Finding, previewing, and managing all of your image assets jumps to a new level of power and convenience with Adobe Bridge CS4, beginning with faster performance from startup through to handing off images to Photoshop CS4. New path-bar navigation and workspace selection buttons across the top of the Bridge window let you instantly jump to just the right display for every task, including new Camera Import controls, visual folder navigation, and a new Carousel View for larger image-group selections. In the Output workspace, Bridge now features PDF-based contact-sheet creation and web-gallery creation and uploading. You can preview 3D images and panoramas created in Photoshop CS4. The new Search field helps you quickly find images in Bridge, and is also integrated with the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X and the Desktop Search feature in Windows Vista. You can even switch to the new, intuitive List View, with its familiar data display and sorting controls.

Tighter integration with Photoshop Lightroom 2 Professionals and other advanced photographers rely on the one-two punch of Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom software as the complete digital photography toolkit. Photoshop CS4 makes this workflow easier than ever, with improved cross-application support for automated functions, such as opening multiple photographs from Lightroom 2 directly into a layered Photoshop document, high dynamic range (HDR) image, panorama, or Smart Object. Lightroom 2 and Adobe Camera Raw also share the same underlying technology, which means the changes you make with Camera Raw 5 in Photoshop CS4 are recognized in Lightroom 2, and vice versa.

Camera Raw 5 with localized, nondestructive adjustments Providing the first step in the processing of raw data from your digital camera, Camera Raw now enables you to make localized adjustments by simply painting the area to be affected, and then using sliders to control the change. Additional enhancements include Post Crop Vignetting, and gradient-based localized correction. You can apply the same Camera Raw adjustments to TIFF and JPEG photographs, and, as always, the corrections you make are completely nondestructive, with the original files being maintained in their pristine state.

Breakthrough 3D editing and compositing With Photoshop CS4 Extended, you can now work with 3D models as easily and powerfully as you can 2D images, without navigating dialog boxes and special layer contents. For the first time, you can paint directly on 3D models, easily convert 2D images or gradient maps into 3D objects, and convert layers into volumes. Wrap a flat design onto a 3D object by merging the 2D layer directly onto your 3D layer. Merge two different 3D layers into a single scene. You can even use video layers as textures, to turn any 3D object into a video display zone. Basic presets will speed the process or turning two-dimensional designs into common 3D shapes such as spheres and cylinders. You can also export 3D layers directly to the OBJ, KMZ, Collada, and U3D file formats. It all means that every creative professional can now take immediate advantage of three-dimensional assets created in today's high-end modeling applications, and use them in their 2D mock-ups and composites. The 3D engine has been rebuilt from the ground up to provide dramatically faster performance; allow editing of properties like lights, materials, and cameras; and create more realistic renderings with a new high-quality ray tracer.

Enhanced motion graphics Adobe Photoshop is an essential part of the motion graphics workflow, and Photoshop CS4 Extended makes that workflow more efficient than ever, starting with the enhanced preview of non-square-pixel images. Easily preview and export the audio content of a video file as well as its frame comments. New keyboard shortcuts are enabled for the Animation panel to make fast work of editing between frames and keyframes. You can now animate the 3D object and camera position, render settings, and cross-sections, bringing new depth to motion-graphics editing. When working with 3D objects, you can even place video layers into your textures, turning any 3D object surface into a video display screen. Especially for film and television professionals, Adobe After Effects CS4 can now directly read and import 3D layers from Photoshop CS4 files.

With Volume Rendering, the 2D images from a DICOM stack (left) become rich, 3D volumes that can be examined from any orientation. Click to enlarge.

New Post Crop Vignetting lets you recreate artistic vignette effects in a photograph even after the original edge of the photo has been cropped away. Click to enlarge.

Photoshop CS4 helps you keep your work area efficient and clutter-free, with a new unified application frame, tab-based interface and self-adjusting panels. Click to enlarge.

Volume Rendering Volume Rendering is a new way to easily convert text, shape, or pixel layers into a volume. Artists can combine painted layers into entirely new and eye-catching 3D volumes. Motion graphics professionals can quickly turn text layers into animated 3D text. Medical professionals can volume render a DICOM image stack into a 3D anatomical image that can be viewed and explored from all angles and depths. Whether the goal is creative or scientific, Photoshop CS4 Extended adds exciting new capabilities with Volume Rendering.

Easier data collection and analysis with the Count tool Allowing fast, simple, point-and-click tallying of objects in scientific images, the Count tool is expanded in Photoshop CS4 Extended to allow for multiple counts, as well as separate colors for each count. This data is easily saved into the file for future reference, and can be collected in the Measurement Log panel for comparison and export to standard text files.

Unified tabbed interface with self-adjusting panels Photoshop CS4 helps you keep your work area efficient and clutter-free, with a new unified application frame, tab-based interface and self-adjusting panels. You'll notice immediately how the Photoshop interface appears cleaner--instead of having to arrange multiple image windows, Photoshop does it for you with a tab for each open image. Docked panel groups keep to the side of your images, so you have fewer things to move around while you work. Individual panels expand and contract automatically to show you the controls you need, and you can even collapse entire panel groups to their header rows with a single click. Of course, you can still manually arrange floating windows and panels to suit your working style, even moving all of your panels to a second monitor if you prefer.

Smarter Smart Objects Smart Object layers allow for nondestructive scaling and transformation of Photoshoplayers. With Photoshop CS4, you can now apply perspective transformations to SmartObjects, work with linked layer masks, and use the new Eyedropper tool option to sampleeither the current layer or all of the layers in the Smart Object at once.

More powerful printing options Photoshop CS4 brings even higher quality to large, detailed images when taken to print. You can now preview out-of-gamut colors and take advantage of a streamlined printing interface. In addition, only on Mac OS X for this release, 16-bit printing is available for the first time, vastly increasing the color depth and clarity possible in printing.

Higher performance on very large images (Windows 64 only) Photoshop CS4 has now been optimized to take advantage of even more RAM on 64-bit-capable Windows PCs that are running a 64-bit version of Windows Vista.

Additional refinements The evolution of Photoshop software always includes a vast array of small but important improvements and additions. Extra refinements in Photoshop CS4 include:

Support for multi-touch gestures available on newer Apple MacBook Pro and MacBook Air computers running Mac OS X Leopard

Clone Stamp and Healing Brush live preview cursor for easier, more precise cloning and healing results

Spring-loaded keys to temporarily shift between tools by holding down a tool shortcut key

FXG export

Device Link color profile support

Notes panel, to keep annotations from cluttering the canvas

Creative Pro Online Services

Photoshop CS4 gives you built-in access to a world of online resources with Creative Pro Online Services. Search for help; share your screen with colleagues or clients in a few clicks; create and share color harmonies; and more.

Adobe Community Help Get the power of an online search engine with targeted results. Searchable content includes the in-depth Photoshop Help, plus additional Adobe and third-party content chosen by experts at Adobe and in the design and production communities. With Adobe Community Help, you can find the focused answers you need, fast, simply by choosing Help > Photoshop Help (Internet connection required).

Acrobat.com Acrobat.com is a set of online services--file sharing and storage, PDF converter, online word processor, and web conferencing--that you can use to create and share documents, communicate in real time, and simplify working with others. Thanks to the connection between one of the Acrobat.com services, Adobe ConnectNow, and Photoshop CS4, you can meet live over the web to share your screen, present creative concepts and ideas, and brainstorm with up to two online guests for no additional service charge. To share your screen with colleagues and clients, choose File > Share My Screen. Guests can then see your desktop on their screens as you work. You can exchange ideas using the chat pod, add a live video or audio feed, or use the Whiteboard feature to enable guests to comment on content. You can even temporarily hand over control of the screen to a guest to collaborate on a file. Additional Acrobat.com services, such as Share, Create PDF, My Files, and Adobe Buzzword, are accessible via your web browser. (Internet connection required.)

Adobe Kuler Explore, create, and share color themes with Adobe Kuler. Kick start your creative projects with color inspiration from the online Kuler community. Browse thousands of themes by newest, most popular, or highest rated; or search themes by tag word, title, or creator. Themes can be downloaded and moved to your Swatches panel with one click. Or use an interactive color wheel that supports standard harmony rules to develop new color themes that you can save, move to your Swatches panel, and upload to share with others (Internet connection required for community functionality).

Adobe Bridge Home Click Bridge Home in the Favorites panel of Adobe Bridge CS4 and stay up to date with what's new from Adobe, and from the design, web development, and video and audio production communities at large. Watch the latest video tutorials for your Creative Suite 4 components, listen to a podcast interview with a leading designer, or learn about the next training event in your community. Discover tips and resources that can help you make the most of Photoshop CS4 (Internet connection required).

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